Chapter 59: First Fight

Aria's POV

She found out from Rocco.

Not deliberately. He mentioned it in passing, something about Romano's response to the meeting, and Aria had looked at him and said what meeting and he'd done the thing where his face went carefully neutral which told her everything she needed to know.

Dante came back an hour later.

She was in the kitchen. She heard the door and heard him come in and heard him stop when he saw her face.

"You went to Romano," she said.

"Yes."

"Without telling me."

"Yes." He set his keys on the table. "I didn't want you in that room. Romano is building a picture of everyone involved and I didn't want you to be in it any more than you already are."

"So you made that decision for me."

"I made it to protect you."

"I don't need protection." She kept her voice level because she meant it as a statement of fact rather than an expression of anger even though the anger was there too. "I need a partner. You decided something about my involvement without asking me and that's not how this works."

"Aria—"

"Don't." She turned to face him properly. "You still make unilateral decisions like I'm a variable in your plan. Like my role is something to be managed rather than something I get to choose."

He looked at her. Not defensive, which would have been easier to argue with. Just listening.

"I was at Romano's building yesterday," she said. "I sat across from that woman and had a real conversation about testifying against my own father. I made that choice. Mine." She paused. "I went into that storage facility last night knowing exactly what I was doing and why. My choice." Another pause. "And then you go to Romano this morning without saying a word to me because you've decided that's what's best for me."

"Because you could be implicated," he said. "Romano is building a case and you're too close to everything and if she decides you're more useful as a person of interest than as a witness—"

"Then that's a risk I get to assess," Aria said. "Not you."

"You don't know how Romano operates—"

"I've sat in her interrogation room at four in the morning," Aria said. "I think I have some sense of how she operates."

Dante was quiet for a moment.

"You still make unilateral decisions," she said again. Quieter this time. More tired than angry. "You do it without thinking about it because you've been making them alone for twenty years and it's what you know. But I am not a variable in your plan anymore. I am a person who is in this with you and that means you talk to me."

He sat down at the kitchen table.

She stayed where she was.

"What did you tell her," Aria said.

"That you were making your own choices and she needed to understand that before she made decisions about how to proceed." He looked at her. "That you did what you did because it was right not for personal gain and I wanted that to be the lens through which she viewed your involvement."

Aria absorbed that.

"That's not nothing," she said.

"No."

"But you still went without telling me."

"Yes." He held her gaze. "I thought I was handling it. I thought if I managed Romano's view of you then you'd be protected regardless of what she found out about last night and you wouldn't have to be in another federal building for a while."

"Managing things on my behalf without my knowledge is what got us into trouble in the first place," Aria said.

That landed.

She could see it land.

His jaw tightened slightly and then deliberately relaxed and he looked at the table for a moment and then back at her.

"You're right," he said.

"I know I'm right. I need you to know you're wrong."

"I know I'm wrong." He said it without qualification. "I made a choice about your situation without asking you. I told myself it was to protect you and that's true but it was also because—" He stopped.

"Because what."

He looked at his hands. "Because asking you meant admitting I was worried. That Romano might decide to use you in a way I couldn't control. And admitting that out loud to you felt like making it more real than I wanted it to be."

Aria looked at him.

This man who'd built his entire life around control and strategy and managing every variable in his environment because at fifteen years old he'd lost control of something completely and it had taken everything from him.

She understood where it came from.

Understanding where something came from didn't mean accepting it.

"I need you to let me carry my own risks," she said. "I need you to tell me when you're worried instead of making decisions because you're worried. Those are different things."

"I know."

"Do you? Because this is the second time since the storage facility that you've done something on my behalf without talking to me first."

He looked up. "What was the first?"

"You told Romano I was making my own choices before I'd said anything about testifying. You got ahead of me."

A beat of silence.

"I was trying to protect your position," he said.

"My position is mine to protect." She crossed her arms. "I'm a surgeon. I spend my entire working life making high-stakes decisions under pressure with incomplete information. I'm not someone who needs decisions made for her."

He ran a hand through his hair. "I know that."

"Then act like it."

He was quiet for a moment. Not sulking, not defensive, just sitting with it the way she'd learned he sat with things when he was actually taking them in rather than performing that he was.

"I'm sorry," he said finally.

She waited.

"I'm still learning how to do this," he said.

"Do what."

"Have someone." He said it carefully. Like the words required some effort. "Actually, I have someone. Do not use them. Not manage them. Not keep them at a distance where I control what they know and when they know it." He looked at her. "Just—have someone. In the actual sense of it. I don't know how to do that without defaulting to the other version."

Aria looked at him sitting at his kitchen table with his keys on the surface beside him and twenty years of solitude in every line of him and the specific difficulty of a person trying to unlearn something that had kept them alive for a long time.

Her anger was still there but it had shifted. Lost its sharp edge. Become something more complicated and less clean that was going to require more than one conversation to work through.

She crossed the room.

She didn't have a speech for this moment. Didn't have something neat to say that resolved it. So she just closed the distance and pressed her face against his chest because that was the honest response and she'd committed to honest responses.

His arms came around her.

They stayed like that for a moment.

"I need you to let me make my own choices," she said into his shoulder.

"I know." His voice above her head.

"Even when they scare you."

"Especially then." A pause. "That one is going to be harder."

"I know." She pulled back enough to look at him. "Try anyway."

He kissed her forehead. Her cheek. The corner of her mouth in the way he had that was quieter than a full kiss but sometimes landed harder.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"I know." She stayed close. "Don't do it again."

"I'll try."

"Trying is acceptable."

They stood together in the kitchen for another minute, not talking, just recalibrating. The fight had been real and the apology had been real and neither of them was pretending otherwise.

Her phone rang.

Sienna.

She answered. "Hey."

"Hey." Sienna's voice was odd. Not alarmed exactly but with something in it that wasn't her usual register. "Are you somewhere you can talk?"

Aria looked at Dante. "Yes."

"Okay so." A pause. "Luca has been looking at those financial documents you sent me. The ones about organ trafficking accounts." Another pause. "He found something. Something that he says is significant and he doesn't want to put it in writing so he wants to talk to you in person."

"What kind of something," Aria said.

"The kind where he made me promise to tell you to bring Dante," Sienna said. "Which tells you how significant he thinks it is."

Aria looked at Dante again. He was watching her face, reading the conversation from her side of it.

"When," she said.

"Tonight if possible. He's been sitting on this for two days and it's making him anxious." Sienna paused. "Aria. He looked pretty shaken when he told me. Whatever he found in those numbers, it's not small."

"We'll be there," Aria said.

She hung up.

Dante: "Sienna's boyfriend."

"He went through the financial documents. He found something about organ trafficking." She met his eyes. "He wants us both there tonight."

Dante reached for his keys on the table.

Not a moment of hesitation.

That was something.